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Comment by brianto2010 | Hacker News Reader

brianto2010·

The point of this service is not to contact you. If they already have the e-mails, then they won't need this service; they will e-mail/spam you anyway. It's in place because...

> Such information can help you correct course before you are too invested in a particular idea you have.

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I'm quite aware. The purpose is to get information about me through exploiting a service. You can put it in a little targeted spam to me to try to get past spam filters and get a favorable reaction.

It's snooping, and it's reprehensible.

I wouldn't call it exploiting; I'd call it 'harnessing public resources', since most of the information collected through this service from Facebook is supposedly public.

Also, how can you have a 'favorable reaction' to spam given that...

> If I ever get an email with my name from a company I've never given information to, I... delete that email.

I also agree that this is snooping. However, this is just a tool, and should be used responsibly. Abuse would make it reprehensible.

Public resources are what I put on my blogs or web sites or what I mark to be public. As has been heavily discussed in this thread, Facebook has changed policies to make certain information public no matter what users choose in their privacy settings.

"how can you have a 'favorable reaction' to spam"

The intent is for people to lower their guard when they read email that's directly addressed to their name and seems to display knowledge of them.

"Abuse would make it reprehensible."

I think its abuse is being promoted, here. I mean, really, reread the blog post.

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